Dec 31, 2014

'Whether as a gift to yourself or an extremely covetable stocking filler, Tom Shone's monograph Martin Scorsese - A Retrospective (Thames & Hudson) is a must for fans, combining enviable access with memorable insight. So while the archive of stills and behind-the-scenes shots is a gold mine, there's plenty of Shone's prose to savour, too. (Surely only Shone could write - of Goodfellas and The Wolf Of Wall Street - that Scorsese "seems fascinated by characters as spiritually dead as they are galvanically alive, rotten with their own ripeness, like apples in Dutch still lives".)' — Olivia Cole, GQ

Dec 26, 2014

BEST FILMS OF 2014


1. Selma
2. Interstellar
3. Under The Skin
4. Birdman
5. Leviathan
6. Boyhood
7. Grand Budapest Hotel
8. Foxcatcher
9. A Most Wanted  Man
10. Ida

BEST TV SHOWS of 2014


1. True Detective
2. Silicon Valley
3. Last Week Tonight With John Oliver
4. The Americans
5. Veep

Dec 15, 2014

And.... one more


"This is the best kind of coffee table book. It fulfills the brief of being picture-led with rare and telling images, but it's Shone's prose that sticks; a bravura high-octane sprint that adroitly mixes up biographical detail and aesthetic judgments... a smart engaged tracking shot of a book." — Teddy Jamieson, The Glasgow Herald

BEST FILM PERFORMANCES OF 2014


1. Steve Carell — Foxcatcher
2. Phillip Seymour Hoffman – A Most Wanted Man 
3. Chadwick Boseman — Get On Up 
4. 
Angelina Jolie — Mailificent
5. Naomi Watts — St Vincent 
6. J K Simmons — Whiplash
7. Ralph Fiennes — The Grand Budapest Hotel
8. Kristen Wiig — The Skeleton Twins
9. Mark Ruffalo — Foxcatcher
10. Edward Norton — Birdman 

Dec 14, 2014



Mesmerized by this video for Nils Frahm's Says, created by visual artists Romain Assénat and Ana Silva:—
"We had the visual idea during a show of Nils in Germany, two days after, we’ve created a device for capturing this idea: a video-feedback with ink on glass captured in one take, in a very analogue way and without any post-production."

Dec 6, 2014

BEST SOUNDTRACKS OF 2014


I. Interstellar —Hans Zimmer
2. Birdman — Antonio Sanchez
3. Under the Skin — Mica Levi
4. The Grand Budapest Hotel — Alexandre Desplat
5. Gone Girl — Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
6. The Theory of Everything — Jóhann Jóhannsson
Boyhood — Various Artists
7. Palo Alto — Various Artists
8. Lost Themes — John Carpenter
9. You And The Night —M83 

Dec 5, 2014

BEST SONGS OF 2014


1. Morning — Beck
2. Hero — Family of the Year
3Do You — Spoon
4. Rather Be — Clean Bandit
5. Small Window — Luluc
6. Head Underwater — Jenny Lewis
7. Afraid of Nothing — Sharon van Etten
8. Waitress Song — First Aid Kit
8. The Long Way Around — Jackson Browne
9. Seasons (Waiting On You) — Future Islands
10. Airwaves — Ray La Montagne

BEST ALBUMS OF 2014


1. Morning Phase — Beck
2. Passerby — Luluc
3. Stay Gold — First Aid Kit
4. GIRL — Pharrell Williams
5. Are We There — Sharon Van Etten
6. Four — One Direction
7. After the Disco — Broken Bells
8. Lost in the Dream — The War on Drugs
9. The Voyager — Jenny Lewis
10. Benji — Sun Kil Moon

Nov 30, 2014

SCORSESE REVIEWS Contd.


"A tribute volume that is hefty, handsome, and smart. The graphic design is downright overwhelming — stunning images from every major Scorsese feature, both inside and outside his elegantly composed frames — but the real draw here is Shone’s text, which tells the stories behind the pictures with intelligence and grace. It’s that rarest of creatures: a coffee-table book that’s also a helluva good read." — Jason Bailey, Flavorwire  
"Scorsese: A Retrospective by Tom Shone (Thames & Hudson £29.95) is a glorious coffee-table delve into the great director’s 23 feature films — including this year’s superb The Wolf of Wall Street. The book features stills, behind-the-scenes shots (Martin Scorsese on his back during the making of Taxi Driver, pointing at his temple to show Robert De Niro where Travis Bickle should aim his finger gun) and page upon page of Shone’s typically fluid, effortless prose." — Sunday Times
"Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective celebrates one of America’s most original and audacious filmmakers. Written by incisive film critic Tom Shone and lavishly illustrated, this book—like a Scorsese film—packs a passionate wallop and is elevated by scrutinous attention to detail.' — Bookpage

On my iPod: Nov 29th 2014


1. Johnny and Mary (feat. Bryan Ferry) — Todd Terje
2. I Can't Live Without My Mother — Sun Kil Moon
3. Repeat Pleasure — How to Dress Well
4. In Conflict — Owen Pallett
5. Immunity (w. King Creosote) — Jon Hopkins
6. Do You — Spoon
7. Seasons (Waiting On You) — Future Islands
8. Fireproof — One Direction
9. Sordid Affair — Royksopp
10. Wonderful Unknown – Ingrid Michelson

Nov 24, 2014

Thank-you to all who came to my event yesterday at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble, bringing my Scorsese publicity binge to a nice close. Photo by Smith Galtney.

Nov 21, 2014

Calling all Scorsese-loving New Yorkers!

On Saturday Nov 22nd at 6pm I will be presenting a sequence of my Top Ten Shots* from the films of Martin Scorsese and signing copies of my book Scorsese: A Retrospective at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble. Come early to be sure of a seat. 
Barnes & Noble 
97 Warren Street,  
New York, 
NY 10007212-587-5389
6pm Nov 22nd  2014

Nov 18, 2014

INTERVIEW: HANS ZIMMER


Film composer Hans Zimmer is too sensible to play favorites with his scores, but he hasn’t taken any new work since completing his score for Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar this summer. “I threw everything into it,” he says. “Right now, I'm not willing to go on another journey. I don't quite want to leave it.”

This would make sense. Both score and film are about the sweet sorrows of intergalactic parting, ramped up to full ambience across the Escher-like distances of Einsteinian space-time. The $165-million epic is Nolan and Zimmer’s fifth collaboration together, after the Dark Knight Trilogy, and Inception, Zimmer’s score for which singlehandedy rewrote the rule book for the blockbuster: Zimmer’s dire, insistent “BRAAAMMM”, sounded by an army of brass instruments, all playing in unison, at the very bottom of their register, is now the klaxon-like call of summer. “I called Hans before I even knew exactly I was going to do this project,” says Nolan. “We realized we spent so much time on the other films we'd done, near the end of the process, trying to penetrate the mechanisms we'd created and get back to the heart of the story.” This time, he thought, “Let's flip the process. Let's start with the score and then build out.“

A short time later, an envelope arrived at Zimmer’s office containing a single sheet of paper on which Nolan had typed, using the same typewriter given him by his father when he was 21, a short précis of the film, drawing as much on Zimmer’s own relationship with his 13-year-old son Jake, as the father-daughter relationship portrayed in the film. Zimmer worked for a day and called Nolan’s wife Emma and the pair drove down to Zimmer’s studio in Santa Monica, where the composer made the usual nervous sounds when playing a filmmaker a new score, sneaking glimpses at him to see how it was going down. Zimmer could tell Nolan was moved. At the end of it, he said simply,  “I suppose I better make the movie, now.”

“Well, yes, but what is the movie?" asked Zimmer, and Nolan started describing this “huge, epic tale of space and science and humanity on this grand scale.”    
“Chris, hang on, I've just written this highly personal thing, you know?”

“Yes, but I now know where the heart of the movie is,” replied Nolan, who referred to Zimmer’s demo throughout production to keep himself and the film on track. It’s the piece of music that plays over the end credits. The score itself, released on iTunes on November 18th, is as remarkable for what it does not contain as what it does. It has no driving drums and string figures, no dominant-key brass swells such as was used to herald the villain’s layer in the later Bonds. Instead it comprises a series of hymn-like compositions for 34 strings, 24 woodwinds, four pianos, and 60 choral singers, in which the strains of 19th century romanticism and the ticking clockwork of Phillip Glass can be heard equally. But the star of the show is undoubtedly the 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ housed at the 12th-century Temple Church in London and played in the movie by its director of music, Roger Sayer. It was Nolan’s idea.
“He has a quiet way of suggesting things,” says Zimmer, “He very quietly said to me, ‘What about the pipe organ?’ Have you ever done a score with that?”

Zimmer immediately saw the shape of it, saw the consonance with that of a rocket ship, and also a breathy rhyme between the air pushing through the pipes of the organ and that being fed into the suits of astronauts. “Between the 17th century and the invention of the telephone exchange, the pipe organ was the most complicated man-made creation,” he says. “Stand next to them and you can hear them breathing, like giants. I just loved the idea that we were, in a funny way, following on in this great endeavor, built over generations — the idea of exploration and invention and time. I have a suspicion, which Chris and I talked about, I said to him, ‘I think all movies, all futuristic movies are inherently nostalgic’.”

A quick test of this hypothesis reveals it is broadly true, in so far as filmmakers have frequented sought to anchor the emotions of their futuristic visions with backwards-facing scores. In 2001: A Space Odyssey Kubrick balanced György Ligeti’s Atmosphères with Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz. For Star Wars, John Williams used a 19th century musical syntax, full of tumbling Korngoldian brass fanfares and sweeping Steineresque strings, as befits a tale set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Williams’s entire career has been built on this principle of musical reverse-engineering. Spielberg called him “a modern relic from the lost era of film”. His score for Close Encounters of the Third Kind contains an echo of  ‘When you Wish Upon a Star’. Close your eyes and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is scored like the romance it is. Jurassic Park is a hymn with strains of Elgar, not such much Jurassic-era as Darwinian. Zimmer’s own Hollywood career began with a similar stroke of counter-intuition in the opposite direction, when he scored Barry Levinson’s Rain Man — a road movie, crying out for slide guitars and a harmonica or two — with a set of sleek, syncopated synthesisers, such as much accompany a visit to Mars. Some might say that was exactly the trip as it felt to Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant, tunnelling through inner space. 

Zimmer’s score for Interstellar isn’t without controversy. Some audience members have complained of not being able to hear the dialogue in some sections of the movie, so rumbling are the bass notes on that pipe organ; one cinema in Rochester has even put up a sign reading “Please note that all of our sound equipment is functioning properly. Christopher Nolan mixed the soundtrack with an emphasis on the music. This is how it is intended to sound.” The pay-off came for the composer when he showed the finished film to his 13-year-old son Jake at Nolan’s editing suite in his garage. “He's sitting next to me, and we're talking about a 16 year old teenager, sitting next to his father.  As a 16-year old the last thing you want to do is let your father know that there any emotions.  The last 20 minutes, he's crying and I mean sobbing. I'm looking straight ahead because I'm trying to not invade his space and embarrass him.  We get to the end of it and I lean in slightly, and I go, ‘So, Jake, what do you think?  Is it all right?’  He goes, ‘All right, Dad?   It's a-maz-ing.’  When he said ‘amazing’ I wish I could have recorded it.”

Nov 11, 2014

My Top Ten Scorsese Shots


On Nov 22nd at 6pm I will be presenting a sequence of my Top Ten Shots* from the films of Martin Scorsese and signing copies of my book Scorsese: A Retrospective at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble. Admission is free, but come early to be sure of a seat. 
Barnes & Noble 
97 Warren Street,  
New York, 
NY 10007212-587-5389
6pm Nov 22nd  2014
* Clue: only two of the above are in my top ten.

Nov 5, 2014

SCORSESE REVIEWS Contd.


'An admiring but clear-eyed view of the great American filmmaker’s career, acknowledging the early masterpieces such as Taxi Driver and Mean Streets but also pointing out the bummers (the rancid Cape Fear) and the slumps that have marked Scorsese’s long career. Although the pictures are marvelous, Shone gives the book the heft of a smart critical biography. Unlike the auteurists who always struggle to praise anything by favored directors, A Retrospective shows how Scorsese struggled to find suitable material after that string of personal films in the 1970s established his name..The excellent chapter on After Hours shows us how that quickly packaged and cheaply produced 1985 black comedy got the director back on his feet. Shone goes against the critical grain in praising the 1986 Paul Newman-Tom Cruise hit The Color of Money and dissing Scorsese’s long in the works The Last Temptation of Christ but his arguments are always strong and his insights are fresh. The oversized book’s beauty is matched by its brains.' — Joe Meyers, Connecticut Post
'Thames &Hudson do themselves proud with Tom Shone’s retrospective on the Martin Scorsese filmography stretching right back to the late 60’s where the, then young, director made his start in the business... Anyone looking for that tall and heavy book on one of the most continuous prolific directors working today need look no further than this."— Filmwerk

Nov 4, 2014

Christopher Nolan: The Director's Cut


From the longer cut of my Christopher Nolan profile:— 
MICHAEL MANN: “He works within the system here in a very commanding way. He has large ideas. He’s a complete auteur.  He invented the post-heroic superhero.  He can come up with an idea for a science fiction heist inside the moving contours of a dreaming mind and he had the boldness and audacity to have that singular vision and make it happen.  His work is very, very focused and it’s truly his own. He operates very much in the present, in the now.   We’re living in a post-modern, post-industrial world with decaying infrastructure. Many feel disenfranchised. Seclusion is difficult.  Privacy is impossible.  Our lives are porous.  We swim in a sea of interconnectedness and data. He directly deals with these intangible but very real anxieties. He’s tuned into the reality of our lives, our imagination, our culture, how we think, how we try to live. The quest to understand that and to tell stories from there, that is a central motivator for him, I think.” 
ANNE HATHAWAY: "We see him very, very calm. You never really see him blow a gasket or get frustrated... usually by the time we come to set the puzzle is solved for him.  For the both times I've worked with him, he's totally open to being surprised by things and discovering things on set and certainly he's always shown me amazing generosity as a director in terms of letting me find me, find my way through the part.  Yeah, he has the whole film in his head before we start shooting. I remember when we were doing the scene in Batman where I pull my mask back and it becomes the cat ears for the first time.  Chris came up to me before we shot the one and I guess we you're working a few weeks at that point, but we haven't, and we're having a great time but we were way more bonded at the end of experience than we were at the beginning.  It's just kind of the way it goes. He came up to me and made a point of saying to me, "Now listen, I'm going to do a lot of takes on this one just because I have the way I want it to look in my head for so long I'm not going to be able to move on until I get exactly right.  It's a complicated shot.  There's a lot of things at work here. The camera has to go, the prop has to work, you're mask has to go up. He just took me through it, and he said, "So if I do it a lot of times, I don't want you to get discouraged, it's not you.' I just thought it showed a great emotional awareness, on his part.  He didn't have to do that, it was so generous of him to make sure that I wouldn't take it personally."
ZACK SNYDER: "I think everyone wants their movies to be successful but I think there's sort of what Chris has been able to generate with the movies that he has made, including the Batman movies I think, is original work that doesn't rely on the whims of pop culture but in  informs pop culture. Which I think is the real trick of any filmmakers not to be a slave to trends but to then create those trends. They look to you for their direction. The Batman movies came out of nowhere. That take, that tone, came out of nowhere. If I had told you it's going to be a super-serious Batman movie that treats Batman like this mythological figure that is completely based in reality. You'd be like, okay that sounds like I don't know if that's going to work." 
NICOLAS ROEG“His films have a magic to them. They’re like incidents in one’s life; some things happen swiftly and some things take a long time to reveal themselves. They're marvelously disguised. Memento has this backwards-running time scheme, and yet you automatically find yourself applying the situation to oneself, to one’s daily life, which is very strange. The slipperiness of time, especially when it involves memory, that feeling of 'it's all true... but it wasn't like that', he’s got that on film, somehow. It’s a very rare thing. People talk about 'commercial art' and the term is usually self-negating; Nolan works in the commercial arena and yet there's something very poetic about his work."
MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY: "Chris knew this was something different than he’d done before. It had all and more of the concept, scope and awe you may expect, yet it’s about family, father’s and daughters, genuine relatable challenges, with real humans rather than archetypes. Chris has always created an  original world on screen as well as the rules within that world, but I think this story if more personal to him, more intimate, more flesh and blood. ...I’ll never forget the days on the glacier in Iceland. Cold, sleet, snow, altitude, two helicopters, a vast desert of frozen earth and caverns, over a hundred crew members in action, the combined elements made for a tremendous affair that many people might have considered overwhelming and dire. Not Chris. Chris was in his element. He was on fire. His focus, his stamina, he was conquering something- I remember looking at him, he looked 20 years younger, his eyes were bluer, his hair blonder and standing taller, a Nordic soul emanating,  like his feet were slightly off the ground in a state of levitation. On this glacier, in the most extreme natural and technical conditions you could imagine, it was as if he was some transmigrant incarnate — like he’d been there before." 

PROFILE: CHRISTOPHER NOLAN


From my Guardian profile of Christopher Nolan:—
'Dressed in his trademark blazer, his shirt collar skewed at the raffish angle of a schoolboy late for rugby practice, Nolan did not seem rattled. Rather, he exuded the unshakeable confidence in his own abilities that you might wish for in the pilot of a 747 you’ve just boarded – an equanimity that stands him in great stead with the studio heads he must convince to green-light his movies. “He comes in, he talks about blowing your mind,” Grey told me, “then he very calmly accomplishes it.” Anne Hathaway, who plays a NASA scientist in Interstellar, remembered struggling with an important speech about the power of love, and finding herself in “an emotionally-frayed place that was making the whole thing feel, quite frankly, a little ‘actor-y,’ quote, unquote,” she said. Nolan came up to her and suggested it would be much more effective if she spoke with “calm certainty” – “as if you were saying something you had known your entire life.”  
It’s how Nolan talks about a lot of things: with the calm certainty of things he has known his entire life. Taking his seat at the front of one of the viewing suites at the photo lab, dark but for the glow of the computers manned by the digital colourists behind him, he munched on peanuts, quietly issuing comments as two sets of images were projected on the screen in front of him. On the left was the film’s IMAX 70mm print – the format it was shot in – and on the right, the digital print in which it will be screened in the majority of cinemas. The projections were flipped to appear as mirror images of one another, so any slight mismatches in luminescence could be detected and eliminated. 
 “As if this film weren’t trippy enough,” one of the colourists quipped. 
 “That's how they advertised the original 2001,” Nolan said, “The Ultimate Trip.” The images, showing Matthew McConaughey approaching the event horizon of a black hole, are no less stunning than Kubrick’s, with something of the blurred beauty of a Gerhard Richter painting. The black hole itself was generated using calculations from theoretical physicist Kip Throne, whose work inspired the movie, and fed into software developed by Nolan’s effects team using computing power so vast – each frame of film took around 100 hours of machine time – that Thorne, watching the footage for the first time, had new insights into the way light behaves near the event horizon of a black hole, which he plans to explore in a series of papers for the Committee of Theoretical Physicists. 
  “Is that a flare?" Nolan asked as another sequence came up, this one showing Hathaway on an alien planet at sunset, a halo of light briefly visible at her shoulder. 
 “We can take that out,” offered Walter Volpatto, the digital colourist who was overseeing the work. 
 “It’s in-camera,” Nolan declared. “Put your can of bleach away. Can you go back to the hospital scene and do a split screen for the whole sequence. To my eyes it all looks a point brighter." 
 Volpatto called up the images, showing McConaughey again, this time entering a hospital room. “It’s pretty good, I think,” he said. 
 “That's always what we strive for in the movie business – pretty good,” Nolan said sarcastically, squinting at the two sets of images. “We lowered it [the brightness] a whole point the other day, so something is drifting. We’re repeating ourselves.” 
 “I put them in,” Volpatto reassured him, referring to the changes. “In my experience, a flipped screen will always reveal new differences. Your eye adjusts. You clear away the moss and then you start to see a whole new level.” 
The implication seemed to be that we were caught in the visual equivalent of Zeno’s paradox: clearing away blemishes only to reveal still more, and so forever on, until such time as you made peace with imperfection. “In my experience,” Nolan replied, motioning toward the bank of computers that separated his production team from the digital colorists, “people behind this line are full of shit.” 
 “This is why I prefer film to digital,” Nolan said, turning to me. “It’s a physical object that you create, that you agree upon. The print that I have approved when I take it from here to New York and I put it on a different projector in New York, if it looks too blue, I know the projector has a problem with its mirror or its ball or whatever. Those kind of controls aren't really possible in the digital realm.”  
“I have no reason to lie to you,” Volpatto said, sounding a little miserable. 
 To the untrained eye there seemed to be no difference between the two images. The atmosphere in the suite rather resembled the air of mistrust that envelops some of Nolan’s films, epistemological thrillers in which protagonists gripped by the desire, above all, to know, must negotiate mazy environments in which certainty is almost impossible. “How can you not know?” the magician played by Hugh Jackman in The Prestige demands of his rival, after a magic trick has left his wife dead. But this could be the cry of any of Nolan’s heroes –  driven by an demand for absolute certainty in worlds where certainty is impossible: Guy Pearce’s amnesia victim in Memento, struggling to remember the clues that will lead him to his wife’s killer, or Leonardo Di Caprio’s dream thief in Inception, attempting to disentangle five levels of dream from reality. Nolan, too, has something of the same mixture of obsessiveness and scepticism, his handsome features always appearing slightly scrunched, as if by some internal calculus that nags at him until it is resolved. 
 “You know, when you left yesterday, I felt like I had maybe been a little rude to Walter,” he told me the next day. “I haven't worked with him before. He doesn't know my sense of humour yet. He was trying to please me and I was like, yeah, you're lying to me. That is my sense of humour. But I went in this morning to finish up, and he said to me, ‘Oh, I looked at the projector, and it was brighter.’ When he analysed it in terms of light output – because he is a very sharp man, Walter – it was exactly one point.” 
 In other words, Nolan was right.'

Oct 30, 2014

SO GLAD I DON'T HAVE TO SEE: Goodbye to Language*


"The dog is by far the most prominent performer in the film, in terms of both his screen time and his centrality to the film’s compositional schema and great idea. He does simple canine things—he frolics by the edge of a pond, swims in the currents of a stream, rummages among leaves, rolls in snow, looks into the camera. And Godard’s camera follows him, impulsively, alertly, tenderly, as if seeking to film with a gaze akin to Roxy’s—not blank or uncomprehending but endowed with a boundless, self-subordinating sympathy... It’s as if Roxy were the agent of reconciliation—not of one merely lover to another but of Godard to the present day, to the rising generation. Near the movie’s end, in a scene (one of many shot in Godard’s home) that features Godard’s voice and a woman’s voice that I think I recognize as Miéville’s, there is a living room in which two empty chairs are placed in front of a TV showing only video snow, and Roxy is there. Even when there’s no movie showing and no one there to watch it, Roxy is there, the survivor of art and artists, their silent witness and the secret bearer of their best aspirations. It’s one of the great and piercing funerary moments in Godard’s films, an utterly unironic, tender testament of love." — Richard Brody, The New Yorker
* An occasional column devoted to those books, movies and art works which would, on balance, better serve us by remaining unread, unwatched and unseen, based on the principle that our reactions to art in absentia can be every bit as rich and meaningful as to works demanding our urgent personal attention. Previous entries hereherehere, here, and here.

Oct 27, 2014

REVIEW: INTERSTELLAR (dir. Nolan)

From my review of Interstellar for Intelligent Life:
'The great magician of cinema is said to have nothing up his sleeve once the trick is unraveled, but both Memento and Inception, once you exhausted their ingenuity, summoned a melancholy worthy of Methuselah. The idea of losing yourself in a dream for fifty years, as Leonardo di Caprio did in Inception, was both awe-inspiring and terrifying, even if Nolan’s fans sometimes give every impression of wishing it physically possible. The emotion sprung by McConaughey when he hears how long he has been away is one I have never encountered in a film before: an entirely new compound of grief, loss, longing and terror at Time’s immensity. I’ve seen it addressed by poets but not $200 million blockbuster moviemakers. Nolan would appear to be the wild offspring Cecil B De Mille and John Donne. The poet who wrote Paradoxes and Problems and who once imagined in “one little room an everywherewould surely have thrilled to Interstellar’s visions of galaxies bent and refracted, as if in a drop of water, by the space-time curvature around a worm-hole. There’s a mesmerizing plainness to the film’s images — they hit you right between the eyes.  In every battle between truth and beauty, you feel, truth won out, and yet the results have a beauty of their own, like that of Higher Mathematics. The blur of light around the circumference of a black hole has the elegance of a Gerhard Richter painting. Many great directors have ventured here and foundered. Robert Zemeckis went into a worm-hole in Contact, which was also based on the work of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, and came back with a vision of a sparkling, astral beach on which Jodie Foster could face her daddy issues. Not even Kubrick could come up with a convincing human drama to match his stunning visuals: 2001 was simply too big for human agency or narrative — his most memorable character was a homicidal robot. But Nolan has thought through his moral universe.  Up here, time is as much of a resource as space and fuel, a fact with radical implications for human behavior and motivation.  In an ordinary Hollywood movie, the desire to see your daughter and the desire to save the planet would be one and the same. But what if you had to choose? Nolan uses relativity to drive a stake right through the heart of evolutionary theory: what if one man, protecting his nest, doomed the species? Hey, an Einstein vs Darwin death match!  Who expected that in the blockbuster hit of the season?' 

More Scorsese Reviews: ****


"The critic Tom Shone, in this film-by-film overview of Scorsese’s work, is alive to the mutating arc of his career – its tactical retrenchments, not just its maverick advances.... There’s a danger of drifting into blandness with this picture packed, coffee-table format: Richard Schickel’s Spielberg volume in the same series, for instance, mostly nodded along with the director’s own judgments. Shone is too vigorous a critic not to put up a fight. He calls Gangs “heartbreaking in the way that only missed masterpieces can be: raging, wounded, incomplete, galvanised by sallies of wild invention”. There’s lots of jazzy, thumbnail writing of this kind, compacted critiques you suspect Shone would merrily expand upon, given more space. His description of Barbara Hershey’s “flushed, hayseed beauty” in the early exploitation flick Boxcar Bertha (1972) is spot on.... Even writing about Scorsese demands a full pot of coffee on the stove – imagine making films the way he does. Shone on the “rich, strange and unfathomable” Taxi Driver (1976) cuts to the essence of what Scorsese is capable of: it’s when his meticulous formal control feels guided, not just by storyboards and perfectionist craft and memories of other movies, but a kind of demon inside, driving him to nightmarish and expressionistic peaks." 
— Tim Robey, The Sunday Telegraph **** out of *****

Oct 24, 2014

On my iPod: Oct 24th


1. Our Destiny Lies Above Us — Hans Zimmer
2. Run Time — Imogen Heap
3. Sugar Storm — Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
4. Summertime — Annie Lennox
5. Up All Night — Owl City
6. Holograms – M83
7. Pets — Deadmau5
8. Likely to Use Something — The Belle Brigade
9. Telstar – Bill Frisell
10. Canto at Gabelmeister's Peak — Alexandre Desplat

Oct 20, 2014

Palazzo have announced my Woody Allen book:—
'A new title created by Palazzo Editions has been announced for publication next autumn. Woody Allen: A Retrospective by film critic and author Tom Shone continues our hugely successful series on the world’s greatest film directors including Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, Roman Polanski and, most recently, Martin Scorsese. The book will be released to coincide with Woody’s 80th birthday in December 2015 and will be published by Abrams in the US, Thames & Hudson in the UK and Knesebeck in Germany. More international sales are to be announced shortly.'

Oct 19, 2014

Trawling the city, collecting indignities

The New Republic has reposted my article on Scorsese and masculinity:—
'Goodfellas is convincing on so many levels — from the thrust and parry of the wiseguys’ talk to the flora and fauna of their clothes and apartments — that it’s easy to forget that underneath it runs a piece of wish fulfillment as plangent as that of Spielberg’s wish to be visited by aliens. As Scorsese put it, “It’s what I thought of these guys when I was six.” Underneath all the carpeting and double-breasted suits and double-lock collars is a dream of what it is to be pass muster with thugs — be invited in, to feel their hands on your back, hear their praise in your ears. The body language Scorsese recognised in Liotta was his own, growing up on the streets of Little Italy: antennae attuned to the first sign of trouble, anxious to avoid another beating from his elder brother, making everyone laugh by talking very fast, turning his nerves into comedy. And beneath the laughter, beneath the nerves, the theme running subterraneously through Scorsese’s childhood? Humiliation. It was a “humiliation” for his family to have to move back in with his grandparents on Elizabeth Street after an altercation with a landlord. Humiliation, too, was what he saw visited on the men he occasionally saw on the street; good men, working for the rackets, who “when the time came for them to do what they had to do, they couldn't do it,” so they just imploded. “They were humiliated constantly.”   It is the thing the protagonists of his films fear the most, certainly in those he made with de Niro, that kettle drum of thin-skinnedness, who turns Taxi Driver into one long trawl for potential insults and affronts to Travis’s dignity — he picks them up like radio signals. It is the great Scorsese paradox, the source of so much comedy as well as tragedy in his work, that men capable of unleashing such violence do so at the daintiest of provocations:  a misunderstood word (“mook”), a glance, the number of blueberries in a muffin.    “It was outta respect,” says Henry Hill (Liotta) as he torches a parking lot  in Goodfellas, and when Scorsese lost the best picture Oscar to Dances with Wolves in 1990, the thing that hurt him the most? "They put me in the front row with my mother, and then I didn't win"— the ultimate slap to an Italian male.'